by Chuck Nishihira Up close this mushroom was nicely formed and colored. But how odd to see the “stem” come from the ground and climb up a tree. The stem had some dried plant material an inch or so in length attached to it. I tried removing this debris, but it was firmly adhered. As […]
by Chuck Nishihira In Panama, this time while hiking in the El Cope area, a tiny group of mushrooms presented themselves. Standing at maybe an inch tall, the group of four almost looked startled that they were even noticed!
Most of these Peperomias are from the Cordillera del Condor, (what a surprise!), but a few are from other parts of Ecuador. Unfortunately I did not realize my camera battery was in backwards (!) for a few hours of walking in the Condor, so I did not get photographs of the multiple, very distinctive clones […]
by Chuck Nishihira So here was the dilemma. While in the Cordillera del Condor, we decided to go hiking one night to look for treefrogs and glassfrogs. We had one good flashlight, one decent headlamp, and one headlamp whose only usefulness was to find the other two real lights in a dark backpack. The group consisted […]
by Chuck Nishihira In the Rio Blanco area of the Cordillera del Condor, there is a nice assortment of Pilea species, not unlike many other areas in Ecuador. In the past, a handful of nice species were available to the terrarium hobbyist. But mostly they have been under-rated and poorly represented. Especially when compared against their […]
by Chuck Nishihira A stretch of road that should have taken an hour to drive is easily stretched out to multiples of that with a plant-lover in the car. To make it worse we had 2 plant-lovers in the car, each with a view of the opposite sides of the road. The happy conversations of […]
By the garden gate today I noticed a conglomerate of baby spiders, probably hundreds of them, all just hatched and resting in one small web. Perhaps some of our entomologist friends can help confirm an ID, but their most distinctive feature is serrated black markings on their bottoms, with an otherwise pale yellow and brown body. […]
This falls outside of what we usually post about, but this spider was too pretty not to put on here! She (?) lives in my garden on some flowers. The whole time I took pictures she stayed perfectly still! A little ant crawled on the flower, and while the spiders eyes didn’t move, in this […]
Before our most recent trip to Ecuador, Chuck and I talked about trying to document habitats in a way that was directly useful and pertinent to the terrarium hobby. We played around with the idea of making a 2′ wire frame, which would act as a size reference, and additionally help to focus some of the hundreds of […]